Edit: I may have given too much weight the the Arkenfox dev’s assessment. Upon more research and consideration, I think Librewolf could still be a better option compared to straight Firefox, though hopefully the Librewolf team receive more help/contributors in the future to ensure its success long term.
I’ve been a user of Librewolf for a about a year now, and it’s always served me pretty well as a nice easy way to get a hardened Arkenfox Firefox.
However, recently I was curious why Librewolf wasn’t recommended on PrivacyGuides, and took a look through their reasoning on their forum. That thread spans multiple years, and for the most part I thought their reasons for not including it were a bit unfair, especially after Librewolf started offering automatic updates.
But towards the end of that thread in October, a Privacy guide team member posted a link to the Arkenfox github issue tracker, where a Librewolf team member reveals how the project appeared to have lost steam after a critical member left, and they are struggling to keep it up to date with the latest Arkenfox updates, despite putting out new releases.
I’m not sure if those problems have been resolved since that time. One of the maintainers did mention they’re still short staffed in this topic on taking over maintaining Mull.
After considering the arguments for and against in the PrivacyGuides thread, I think their conclusion for not recommending does have some merit. Using Librewolf adds an additional layer of trust, not only to not be malicious (which I don’t suspect they are) but to also be able to adequately fulfill what they set out to do reliably.
Another big part of them not recommending it was the existence of the Mullvad Browser, which I didn’t realize was in fact a very well hardened version of Firefox (essentially the Tor browser without the Tor part), and is far more effective for private browsing compared to Librewolf or an Arkenfox’d firefox.
Ultimately you’ll have to come to your own conclusion, but personally I’ll be switching back to Firefox as my convenient daily browser full of addons, alongside the mullvad browser for (more) private browsing.
Ex-DDG Browser user here. Personally, it’s not very good. I really only used it whenever a site, usually the pesky ones by the government, broke in Librewolf (my main browser).
It’s better than Chrome, of course. Out of the box, DDG blocks trackers and ads to a certain extent as it has an extension of the same name embedded into the browser. However, it has no extension support (cannot install extensions fr the Chrome Web Store), making it subpar when it comes to content blocking (no uBlock origin) and customization (no DarkReader), among others.
Really, you’re better off using Firefox with uBlock origin set at medium mode.
I feel that the only use case for DDG browser is for non-technical people like me to have a more private browsing experience without much tinkering. Yet, it takes very little reading and experimentation to understand how uBlock origin’s medium mode works and how it is waaaaay better at ad blocking and in preventing/minimizing cross-site tracking.